There are a number of communications protocols relating to bus communications, particularly for circuit-board level inter-chip communications. In some of these bus architectures, there is a single common data line and the protocol manages control and access to the data line. One popular example is the Inter Integrated Circuit (I2C) bus communication protocol. Some developmental work is occurring to specify an improved version of I2C that may be called I3C.
One of the drawbacks of the I2C protocol is that there is significant signaling overhead if the message being read or written is short in number of bits. When a master device on the bus is configured to periodically and frequently read sensor data or other small quantities of data from a number of slave devices, the protocol control overhead cost can overwhelm the size of the data being read or written resulting in an inefficiency in the transfer rate of 3-4 times as compared to a situation where only the original device data was sent and without any control information as required by the protocol.
Similar reference numerals may have been used in different figures to denote similar components.